The purpose of this study was to explore how three struggling, sixth grade readers experienced an after-school program designed to increase their affective and cognitive reading performance. Research in the areas of vocabulary acquisition, reading strategy development, discussion of text, time spent reading, engagement, and reader self-perception…

Research on early adolescence reveals significant declines in intrinsic motivation for reading and points out the need for metacognitive strategy use among middle school students. Research indicates that explicit instruction involving motivation and metacognitive support for reading strategy use in the context of a discipline is an efficient and…

Not too long ago, on a visit to two sixth-grade classrooms, the author saw very clearly the challenge teachers have before them when they try to differentiate reading. In both classrooms, 11-year-olds who read like fourth graders shared tables with classmates who read like the average ninth grader--a five-year span. How teachers approach this…

Serious reading problems exist among middle school learners as evidenced by declining national reading scores and increased dropout rates. In response to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) expectations in reading, several experts have promoted a scripted repeated reading strategy such as readers' theater as a possible approach to improving student…

Sound symbolism is the notion that there is a subset of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. Two studies assessed 5th and 6th graders' knowledge of word meanings for English sound symbolic and non-sound symbolic words. Both studies found that the meanings of sound symbolic words were…

Recent calls for border crossing between reading and science have heightened the need to support science teachers in integrating reading into science and to verify the robustness of this approach in the context of inquiry-based science. In this paper, we share what we did, found, and learned in a collaborative project in which a team of…

It is easy for intermediate students to get the wrong ideas about the purpose of reading. Educators pay so much attention to decoding and fluency in the early years that children sometimes come to believe that flawless and rapid word recognition is the point. As texts get more demanding or unfamiliar, some of the "good readers" in classes begin to…

Middle school science teachers report using textbooks regularly although these textbooks have been criticized for not following standards-based principles for concept learning, and student reading achievement has been stagnant for 20 years. Effective strategic reading instruction has been documented for middle school students but few teachers use…

The purpose of this action research paper is to disseminate the results of a 2-month study which focuses on how a student's first language (L1) reading comprehension skills affect the same skills in their second language (L2). The subjects of the study are sixth grade girls, ranging in age from 11 to 13 years old. They attend a private bilingual…

According to government reports, new Internet technologies present readers with new reading opportunities and challenges (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000; RAND Reading Study Group [RRSG], 2002). However, we are just beginning to understand the specific complexities that Internet text imposes on the reading…

The authors of this action research project report implemented oral reading fluency-based interventions for the purpose of improving students' reading comprehension. Six students in grade three, six students in grade five and six students in grade six participated in the study from Monday, August 27 through Friday, December 7, 2007. Researchers…

This study examined the effects of repeated reading using above grade level narrative passages on: (a) reading rate as measured in words per minute (wpm) and (b) reading miscues. A single group, pretest-posttest design was used to measure the treatment effects. The study group consisted of 11, sixth grade African-American students with learning…

Too many middle school students struggle to comprehend their textbooks in science and other content areas. Thus, many adolescent learners lag behind in developing scientific literacy, which the National Research Council has defined as sufficient understanding of the scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making,…

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggest that Chinese…

This study investigated how two readers of Mandarin with differing reading-proficiency skills interacted with a narrative passage, as well as what knowledge they brought to and made use of while reading the text. The perspectives of reading comprehension, transactional theory and social-cognitive models of reading served as this study's…